


Desert of Souls

by Ingeniarius_Mundos



Category: Journey (Video Game 2012)
Genre: Atmospheric, Gen, Impressions of the journey, with some headcanons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:49:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27409873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ingeniarius_Mundos/pseuds/Ingeniarius_Mundos
Summary: The journey is as old as time, but it's never quite the same. A companion piece to "Ocean of Wisdom."
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	Desert of Souls

A star arcs over the desert. In the same moment, a Traveler in red wakes from a meditation. She too has been a star, though she does not remember.

She climbs a dune and beholds a distant mountain in the hazy morning light, its glowing peak cloven in two. No one has told her that this is where she must go, but that’s all right. The mountain is enough.

She skirts more grave markers, some topped with ragged red banners, and senses a vague, ancient sorrow that is and is not her own. She knows these are grave markers, though she has never been told so, and she does not know who is buried here. This knowledge is not a memory. It is an inheritance.

Solemnity and curiosity surround her in equal measure. She dances lightly up the crumbled steps of a red-baked ruin, and there she sings to the little scraps of cloth fluttering about the platform. They fill her with warmth. Suddenly she becomes aware of a short scarf at the back of her neck. She did not know she ought to have a scarf, but now that she does, she cannot imagine ever being without it. Spreading her cloak like wings around her, she lifts off the platform and flies. She has never done this before, and yet she must have, because it feels as natural and effortless as breathing. Beneath her, the desert is pale gold in the morning light, every grain of sand agleam.

There are motes of light amidst the crumbled buildings in the valley below, shaped like ancient letters. Each time she skates through one, warmth and energy flow through her and her scarf grows a bit longer. Now she can flutter up the crumbling tower here in the valley. At the top is a grate, which she releases with her voice. Rushing out, scraps of cloth converge around her like insects around flowers and lifting her across up to an altar. She sings, and the desert sings back. This land has a language all its own for those who know how to listen.

In the silence that follows the echo of her song, she slips into the interior world of her mind. She is not alone. A tall, white-robed figure stands beside her, and she knows instinctively that this is an elder, a wise one. A vision unfolds before her, as if a divine hand is etching it on a cave wall. The mountain sends a brilliant light into the heavens that cascades down as stardust, causing birds to flock and crops to grow and people to arise. In every living thing is a core of sacred starlight.

She thinks about the motes of light she has found in the desert, and wonders.

888

A vast bridge, bleached white with hints of red. It’s like the bones of an ancient animal, but some of the vertebrae are missing. Scattered around the base are metal creatures with cunning serpent faces. The machines (that’s odd: there is no such word in her language as she knows it. The closest her mind can conjure is “contrivance” or “expedient,” and she feels again that tension between the things she knows and the things she should not know) are gray, cold, unbefitting of the desert. But within them are fragments of cloth the same color as her cloak, the setting sun, life’s blood. She sings to them, and they come to life, filling in the gaps that time has left in the bridge. They flock and swirl like living things with a collective consciousness.

Now she is skating, flying up red-and-gold avenues of living cloth. Her heartbeat quickens with excitement: this is good, this is right, it is right to fly. At an altar before a waterfall of sand, a white-robed ancestor reveals another chapter in the story of her people. Painted on the cave wall of her mind, elegant buildings arise. The red cloth runs through them like water through an aqueduct. The cities shine with radiant light.

888

A vast sea of sand, each dune a wave. The afternoon sun is so bright that the sand is pink and the sky is pale green. She feels very small and isolated, but not unpleasantly, and not for long. This place thrums with life. It’s hidden in more of the fallen machines (that strange word again!) – cloth creatures like birds with square heads and streaming tail feathers. They warble playfully to her, diving in and out of the sand dunes and sometimes lifting her up. They help her reach motes of light atop pillars and leaning towers. Her scarf grows ever longer.

The mountain lies ahead as always, wearing a skirt of clouds. It doesn’t occur to her that she could pass by without awakening the life in this place, that she could simply continue towards her destination and leave the desert to its slumber. That would be unnatural somehow.

As she flies and dances and skates, a star returning from the mountain sweeps by and sheds a bit of its light: another mote for her scarf. She knows, somehow, that this is how the dead return.

The valley beyond the dunes is shrouded in a veil of suspended sand. The ruins here are larger than any she has yet seen, and somehow ominous. A deep rumbling echoes from inside one of the towers, accompanied by flashes of blue lightning. There are serpent-faced machines inside, mounted on some kind of mechanism, rotating and flashing but not firing ( ~~not yet~~ ); their fangs are withdrawn. More cloth birds are trapped in the window grating – are they powering this ancient device? She sings to them to set them free, and in gratitude, they lift her to the next altar. Here the ancestor reveals more gleaming cities, magical cloth ever gaining in power and wonder. Ornate architectures rise from the desert sands and aspire to touch the wind.

A flock of cloth birds emerges, warbling, inviting her to join them. One scoops her up and sweeps her off through the veiling dust.

888

As she slides through crumbling archways, she feels a brief loss of control, but that’s all right; she is a child of the desert and she is made for this. It’s in her blood like the sun and the song and the magic of the stars. Soon she is dancing more than sliding, riding rivers of air and sand. She launches herself down into a fortress courtyard ringed by towering walls, where she sets more cloth birds free from the serpent-faced machines. They bear her up over the walls. Then she is off again, with hardly a moment to catch her breath.

The city is denser here – or it was – with watchtowers and temples and tall, delicate bridges. She skates through an arcaded corridor where everything turns to bronze and gold, and between the pillars she watches the sun set over the mountain and the towers of old. Then suddenly, the slope steepens. The ruins condense around her like water spiraling down a drain. Her heartbeat accelerates in time with her descent. She passes beneath a series of viaducts, and then there is nothing but air.

The shadows beneath the crowded city hold a small, unassuming altar. Here in the recesses of her mind, the ancestor shows her the magic cloth fading from the glorious cities. The lights flicker and die. The people begin to fight over what remains. They build monstrous serpentine Guardians to wage war on one another. The cities are shrouded in the fog of battle. “Guardian” is another word she should not know, like “machine,” and the Guardians are indeed machines. Stranger still, the name does not fit. The Guardians do not seem to protect anything at all.

888

The cavern before her is dim and green-lit. That is a very strange color for the desert. She knows it should make her uneasy, but as of yet she is not afraid despite the shadows all around. Still, the air around her has a weight of the subterranean and the lost that she does not like. She is meant for open sands and open skies.

Passing beneath crumbled archways and bits of wall and strange metal tunnels (her instincts whisper that these are hiding places, but she pushes that aside), it suddenly becomes clear why this sunken city feels so odd: it’s underwater. At least, that is the illusion. Dust drifts in the air, sparkling like bubbles in the last rays of the setting sun that filter through the high windows. Lengths of cloth grow up from the ground like kelp. Another room, high-ceilinged as a temple, is filled with cloth jellyfish – a foreign word, though perhaps there was a sea here once. She knows intuitively that she must climb them, draw briefly on their magic to keep her scarf lit. This place is redolent with a sense of lost power and glory. This only sharpens its beauty to an exquisitely painful point.

In the tunnels beyond, all is silent. Ordinarily, she likes silence. Silence is for meditation and vision and magic. Not this silence, however. This silence is wrong.

Without warning, a winged Guardian bursts out of the sand like some monstrous dragonfly. It flies off to patrol, chittering unthinkingly to itself, still bound to its ancient purpose. The Traveler can tell that this was once a great palace, with high, ornate windows and ceilings stretching to the heavens, but now it belongs to the sand and the creatures of war. She skirts around the Guardian as it glides down the middle of the room, making bizarre mechanical pulsings and warblings. The sounds remind her of the cloth birds, but mangled and mocking. She can only cling to the walls or duck into the metal tunnels as the Guardian patrols by with its one staring eye. The sand is piled high here, though, and it’s difficult to keep her footing.

Inevitably, she slips. Before she can stop herself, she is sliding down the middle of the final room with two Guardians locked onto the scent of magic in her scarf. The red glow of their eyes erupts around her. Then, just as she thinks herself caught, a golden barrier rippling with glyphs arises to repel her pursuers. The chamber falls is silent again.

The altar beyond is large, lit by a grid of runes. Here, the ancestor sings her a vision of war. The sand covers the dead people and the dead cities, leaving only the winds and the graves and the fragments of stardust. Then one of those stars descends to a dune. It is she herself, the Traveler realizes, she and every other Traveler like her.

888

This chamber is like a wheel. The huge central pillar is the hub, and the wrought-iron bridges extending from the walls at varying levels are the spokes. There are altars all around, spiraling up to the distant ceiling.

The murals begin where the ancestor’s vision ended: with a lone Traveler standing on a dune. The lower part of the room fills with a mist of golden sand when she sings to it. It’s like air, but sweeter and lighter, and it fills her scarf so that she can fly higher. The cloth insects form bridges for her as she goes.

At the next altar, she reveals a mural of a Traveler calling forth cloth birds from a ruined city. As it is sung, so it becomes: the cloth birds appear before her, accompanied by jellyfish floating in the rising golden mist. Here the birds swim more than fly, like long-tailed fish. They don’t mind. To them, water is much like the sky.

Climbing the jellyfish brings her to another mural, this one depicting a Traveler descending through the sunken city and past the marauding Guardians. With this third awakening, a massive cloth whale with fins like wings arises to carry her through the mist.

The next mural shows the Traveler ascending a stairway. It appears before her as the mist rises: a series of wrought-iron chandeliers connected by cloth bridges. When did she climb so high? She hardly noticed, so enthralled was she with the murals and the life blooming all around her. The whole pillar is lit up now, gloriously gold. As she ascends, she notices for the first time that the mist is full of drifting runes. She has always known that the souls of the dead return as stars, but if this is true…then this tower is brimming with the fallen.

In the final mural, a star shines above the city.

She reaches the altar at the very top of the temple. The ancestor awaits her in the corners of her mind. This vision is familiar: it is every mural she sang into life into the temple below, every stage of her own journey, culminating on the mountain’s bitter, windswept slopes.

The ceiling and walls around the altar come alight with runes, all flowing into her and filling her with warmth for the journey ahead. Suddenly the pieces fall into place. Every mote of light in this temple, every star arcing down from the mountain, every glyph she took up into her scarf – they are all people. The souls of the fallen are supporting her. They are with her, in her scarf, and she will take them home to the mountain.

888

The mountainside is cold and gray. The scarf with which she once flew over the desert soon freezes and dulls, threatening to drag her down. Bits of cloth bristle from the ground, but they are dull with cold as well. The Guardians soar menacingly above. The mountain is close, but the clouds threaten to obscure it. She crouches behind path markers and shivers as the winds buffet her small, delicate body. The snow ripples like the dunes. But snow is not sand. It is much heavier.

There are grave markers on these slopes. Many.

The moon rises as she struggles around the edge of a gorge. It does not warm her as the sun does, just mourns for her in silence. She is granted one moment of salvation when she reaches an altar with a glowing lamp which melts the ice from her scarf, but she knows this will be the last. She must go back out into the cold. Despite all who have died here, the snow is just snow – there are no souls to help her. She has just enough strength to sing a cloth bridge into life across the gorge. Her voice is low and brittle, like a plucked string.

She struggles through the deepening snow. She remembers an old, old legend of the Bladed Wind which tests the souls of the courageous, and she thinks that surely this must be it.

A Guardian passes just above and hones in on her before she can hide, snapping off part of her scarf. She feels no pain of her own; her terror is solely for the souls she carries. The Guardian has surely taken some of them. They will be scattered again, and what will happen to them then? But she can barely think. She is disoriented and she hardly knows where she is anymore; everything is white and gray; why did the endless gold of the desert never seem so featureless? Wounded, she crouches through the metal bones of war machines to hide from the circling, howling predators as she makes her way ever higher. She can’t even see the mountain anymore. In the underground passages, she yearned for the open sky, but this is not what she wanted.

She pushes through a gateway against a tide of wind and makes her way into a sheltered valley. Tall cliffs rise on both sides, sparing her the Bladed Wind for the first time since her arrival on the mountain slopes. Cloth birds flutter sluggishly ahead, and she tries to take heart from them.

There is a graveyard of old cloth on the ridge ahead. She sings to them, her voice bleeding red into them and driving back the white of death. This journey is a requiem, she thinks as she scales the cliff wall, but that does not have to mean surrender. Only rest.

Then she is out on a fortress balcony, terribly exposed once more. She has to duck behind boulders and brace herself against railings so as not to be swept into the abyss by the wind howling down the stairs. Her scarf and cloak are completely covered in frost now and she cannot feel anything, but she has to go on for the sake of her precious cargo. If she must be numb, then so be it. At last, she pushes through the final gateway.

The world explodes with brutality. The winds toss her body this way and that like a titan playing with a toy. The mountain is shrouded in lightning and storm clouds, but she can just barely see the light at its peak, and in the core of her dying mind she knows she must reach it. All the souls she carries in her scarf depend on her. She no longer knows where she is walking. Maybe it doesn’t matter; maybe all paths lead to the mountain as long as she just keeps walking. She cannot sing anymore.

There are more gravestones. It’s as if the world is angry for what the ancestors did to the magic.

Then suddenly, all is silence. The storm is still raging, but it has faded from her perception. She is too cold even to feel the cold. Each step is smaller, slower, harder. She just wants it to be over, but she cannot give up.

The mountain is gone. Her hope is gone. She collapses.

The snow covers her body as the sands covered the desert dead.

888

But this journey is not quite over. The ancestors stand before her, six of them, robed in white. They gaze at her in silence, and then as one they seem to decide that she has passed her test. They lift her up. Her scarf is restored, and her body warms. She knows what to do.

She flies.

She rockets upward like a shooting star, up and up and up through the clouds. The Guardians circle around her, but they don’t matter; she is fierce with warmth and she is ascending with her precious souls in tow and they are giving her strength.

Then she is above the clouds, and she knows a moment of wonder before her heart begins to burst with song and joy and life.

She soars up bridges of cloth, skates down snowy slopes, climbs pillars of kelp, bounces up jellyfish, breathes deep of the silver mist that keeps her scarf lit. Even the whale from the temple is here, crooning as it bears her higher and higher. Her joy is so sharp that it hurts, and she knows in the core of her being that absolutely nothing can harm her now. This is not the end of her journey, but for now she is content to dance amidst the clouds and hear the bells of the world toll for her triumph. Surely, this is what it feels like to be a god.

The peak is just ahead now, past a few more waterfalls. She does not know what lies beyond, but in her heart she is sure that it is good and perfect, because the stardust souls are there too, some coming, some going. Perhaps some will be released from the cycle and carry on to their rest, and perhaps others will go back as she did and return the lost to their point of origin. The mountain alone knows whose fate will be whose. Perhaps now is not her time to rest. Perhaps she will go back again and help others on their way, until one bright day the cycle is broken and no more are lost. Then they will all be healed and reborn together, and they will build something new and beautiful. But for now it doesn’t matter. This circle is closed.

She walks into the light.

**Author's Note:**

> I know the glowing symbols you find throughout the game to extend your scarf probably aren't supposed to be souls, but I really liked the idea of the Travelers being reborn to recover their lost kindred.


End file.
